Tag: AIB

GPU shipments are recovering and according to Jon Peddie Research, the graphics market increased 4.6 percent last quarter, while the PC market as a whole took a 2.5 percent sequential dip. Intel and AMD upped their market share, at Nvidia’s expense, of course.

The increase in overall GPU shipments reveals that many customers are choosing to “double-attach,” or add a discrete GPU to a system with integrated graphics. This doesn’t really paint the full picture, as practically all Intel non-server chips ship with integrated graphics and the same goes for more than two thirds of AMD chips. As a result, the average PC today has 1.4 GPUs on board.

On a year-to-year basis total graphics shipments in the second quarter dropped 6.8 percent. Once again this was better than PC shipments, which slipped 11.2 percent. JPR expects the total shipments of graphics chips in 2016 to hit 319 million units and the CAGR from 2012 to 2016 now stands at -1.4 percent.

AMD’s overall PC graphics shipments increased 10.9 percent and the company upped its market share to 21.9 percent. However, shipments of APUs declined 9.6 percent. Shipments of APUs in notebooks increased 47.1 percent, but it should be noted that AMD’s presence in notebooks is rather limited. With that in mind all it takes to get such a high figure is a few design wins.

Nvidia was the big loser last quarter. Its desktop discrete shipments were down 8.9 percent, while discrete mobile shipments were down 7.1 percent. It should be noted that Nvidia scored the vast majority of Haswell notebook design wins, but new notebooks aren’t exactly flying off shop shelves right now.

Although some of the numbers are encouraging, total GPU shipments were down 5.2 percent from the same quarter last year. The trend for discrete GPUs remains negative, with a CAGR to 2016 of -2.2 percent.

Dutch add-in-board partner Club 3D has ditched Nvidia and decided to become an AMD exclusive partner. The move doesn’t come as much of a surprise, since Club 3D was practically the only big AIB that did not launch Geforce 700 desktop boards last month.

The company confirmed that it is an AMD-only players in a press release late Monday. Acting CEO of Club 3D Judith Ma Tseng said Club 3D believes AMD is “uniquely positioned to deliver a complete solution concept” for its customers.

“We firmly believe that we can offer a better solution, if we proceed with AMD alone,” said Ma Tseng.

Unsurprisingly, AMD welcomed Club 3D’s turncoat antics.

“Their decision to join AMD as an exclusive hardware partner is a powerful acknowledgement of our leadership in the graphics space, and a tremendous contribution to the technical expertise in the AMD Radeon graphics ecosystem,” said Zvika Greenstein, Director of Desktop Product Management, AMD Graphics.

This isn’t the first time that an AIB has chosen to switch sides, or go exclusive. Back in 2010 XFX also ditched Nvidia and became an AMD exclusive partner. Gainward did the exact opposite, when it stopped selling Radeons to focus on Nvidia products.

However, it should be noted that all AIBs, especially smaller ones like Club 3D, are facing a lot of pressure. Sales of desktop PCs have been tumbling for years, while at the same time powerful integrated graphics are slowly killing off the high-volume, low-margin market for entry level discrete graphics.

Earlier this month AMD went into damage control mode, after comments made by an exec in China were misinterpreted by tech hacks, or Google translate. The comments seemed to indicate that AMD’s next generation Radeons will not appear this year, while in fact AMD’s strategy this year will be to focus on HD 7000 sales, with HD 8000 products coming on line in late 2013.